Re: Failed to port datastore to RDF, will go Mongo

Hi Friedrich,

On Thu, 2010-11-25 at 00:43 +0100, Friedrich Lindenberg wrote:

> Anyway, I'd like to raise some additional points for the future: 
> 
> 1. I'd like to get a better picture of who is currently developing end-user open government data applications based on linked data. Given that there is a massive push towards releasing OGD as LD, I'd be eager to find out who is consuming it in which kind of (user-facing) context, especially regarding government transparency. More precisely: is RDF used primarily as an interchange format or are there many people actively running sites using it? 

We have been doing a little of of this. In particular, we developed a
simple data explorer for the LOD local government spend data which we're
working out how best to make public.

This uses the Linked Data API [1] to expose the data from a triple store
and client-side javascript for the UI, though could equally well have
been done server side.

However, we are not a fair test case! [2]

[Aside: Having been actively involved the LOD side of UK open government
data then the term "massive push" isn't one that I would use, at least
not in that context! There has been genuine interest, some very hard
work by a few motivated people and some promising results but not that
much in the way of, say, resourcing. There *has* been some effective
publicity thanks to TimBL and Nigel Shadbolt but that has emphasized the
opening of data more than it has particular data representations, which
I'd regard as a good thing.]

Dave

[1] http://code.google.com/p/linked-data-api/

[2] We co-developed the ontology for publishing the data, co-developed
the spec (and an implementation) for the Linked Data API and are active
developers of the open source Jena RDF toolkit on which the backend of
this small app is based.

Received on Thursday, 25 November 2010 09:46:01 UTC